Thoughts on life, God and faith from a local church minister and teacher

Sunday, July 7, 2013

HEATWAVE ALERT: How Hot Is It?

Heat wave (noun) 1. A
period of abnormally and uncomfortably hot and unusually humid weather.
Typically a heat wave lasts two or more days.

--The National Weather
Service

“Everybody talks about
the weather but nobody does anything about it.”

--Mark Twain

Is it really hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk during
this, the first big heat wave of the summer of 2013? As I write these words on the
7th , we are at five days and counting of 90 plus degrees since the 3rd.
This isn’t our first heat wave. That mini
blast furnace began on June 24th when the temperature hit 95
degrees, tying a record set in 1976, but the wave only lasted three days.

Steamy enough to cook an egg?Well…not even close. For that you need a temperature of 158 degree Fahrenheit
and according to The Library of Congress website, concrete sidewalks can’t get
much hotter than 145 degrees.But that
didn’t stop the folks of Oatman,
Arizona from sponsoring their
annual Solar Egg Frying Contest this past July 4th.In that land of “But it’s a dry heat!” even
there it is still not hot enough to sauté “l’ouef”, but…it’s pretty darn toasty.
106 in the shade today, according to the weatherman.

But I digress from this, our current heat wave.Funny thing about the weather: it always
gives us something to talk about. Something in which there is really nothing at
all at stake, no argument to be won, no political view to be bested, no point
to be emphasized other than…it’s hot. So if you’re tired of talking about the
latest from the Bulger trial (he’s a thug—case closed), the tragedy that is the
Aaron Hernandez murder mess (never saw that coming) or the revolution in Egypt (military
coup or overthrow of a theocracy?), you can always just bring up the heat.

Try to avoid the obvious inane question, as in, “Hot enough
for you?” Don’t even go there. Also watch out for other weather clichés like “hotter
than hell”.Livescience.com posits
“hell” as perhaps being located at the earth’s core which tops out at 11,000
degrees so we are not quite that hot yet.Or even “hotter than a firecracker on the 4th of July”. Gunpowder
burns at 801 degrees so we’re still about 710 degrees short.And just for the sake of decency avoid all
mention of heat stroke, heat cramps, heat exhaustion and especially heat
rash.Some things are best left unsaid.

On second thought let’s not even talk about the heat.It just makes me hotter, hot and bothered,
all hot under the collar.Let’s be cool
as we converse.Recall just how cold it
was in Boston about six
months ago. On February 11th, the temperature bottomed out at
15 degrees and three days before, the blizzard of ’13 dumped 24.9 inches of the
white stuff on the Hub. Can’t win for losing. Can’t do much about the weather
but talk about it or better yet, just accept it.

Accept the joy and the misery and atmospheric adventure of
living in a place like New England. Think of
all our poor friends in San Diego, California, the most temperate climate in the U.S., a place
which on average never dips below 49 degrees or above 78, where it almost never
snows and no hurricanes nor nor’easters threaten, where a really hot day is
above 80.What do they talk about?The Padres baseball team who were just swept
in three games by the red hot Red Sox?Certainly
not the weather. Not like us.

So…just crack a cold one. Crank up the AC. Put the fan on
full blast if you got it.Get a Dell’s
Slushy Lemonade when you’re down in Rhode Island or a sloppy vanilla ice cream
cone at C&L Frosty’s in Sherborn, right on Main Street.Turn up the ballgame on the radio.Jump in the ocean on Wollaston Beach.Dive off the dock on Lake Winnipesauke
and revel in the heat.Then store that
memory away for next January when you get all chilly about the weather.

It’s July in these parts.It’s a heat wave.Hot enough for
you? Couldn’t resist.